Photo: Nintendo Switch Online: Pros, Cons, and Unknows by BagoGames sourced from flickr.com is licensed under cc by 2.0
by Alice McIntyre
I, like many other people, bought a Nintendo Switch towards the start of this pandemic. I literally haven’t spent more than an hour on any game aside from “Fire Emblem: Three Houses,” which I sunk 30 hours into in three days, on just one campaign route. (I picked Edelgard, if you’re curious.) That’s roughly 41% of that 72-hour period, and I hadn’t even finished yet! So much for joining the “Animal Crossing” crowd on Twitter.
“Fire Emblem: Three Houses,” released on July 26, 2019, is a tactical role-playing game in which the player takes up the role of Byleth, an ex-mercenary who becomes a tutor for the military academy at Garreg Mach Monastery. The titular Three Houses refer to the academy’s three schoolhouses, which represent the three rival nations on the continent of Fódlan, the game’s setting. The player chooses to lead one of the Three Houses, which determines who they will align with as the story unfolds. Your chosen House also determines which characters are at your disposal in the game’s turn-based strategy combat segments. The player can interact with members of their team during downtime, which provides them with a variety of in-game benefits like increased support levels between units or more skill increases during instruction segments, as well as a series of cutscenes that help flesh out the game’s characters.
It goes without saying that I think “Fire Emblem: Three Houses” is excellent. The setting draws me in, I find the characters adorable in many ways, combat is intuitive and enjoyable, and I’m a slut for political dramas. As Brian David Gilbert of Polygon put it, the “Fire Emblem” series “ … pushes the boundaries of gaming by daring to ask the question, ‘what if chess made you horny?’” and it works. Plus, “Fire Emblem: Three Houses” refers to the player with they/them pronouns the whole time, which is a bonus in my book.
If you notice the title of this article, you might wonder when I explain why “Fire Emblem” is important to me. That would be now.
I regret to inform you that, for a significant period in my life, I was a gamer boy. Cargo shorts, graphic tees, and excessive Mountain Dew consumption included. It wasn’t my proudest near-decade. For me, video games provided a sense of escape from a dreary set of closeted circumstances. Hundreds upon hundreds of fictional worlds to explore and immerse myself in were out there. I didn’t have to be who I was. I didn’t have to be alone.
But as I got a little better adjusted, I slowly stopped playing. First I shifted away from fantasy games to strategy and simulation, ditched those when I got really into tabletop role-playing, and ran out of time once I graduated high school. I felt content to explore the world that was right in front of me, to see my storyline and those of the people around me unfold.
As the saying goes, though, shit happens. Sometimes everything around you gets very difficult very quickly and you don’t know what to do with yourself, and once again, you’re lost. Lost people often find comfort in what’s familiar.
I first heard of “Fire Emblem” when I was about 9 or 10 years old, having heard about it through characters from the series appearing in “Super Smash Bros. Melee.” Having annoyed my mom into taking me to my favorite game store, I got my grubby little hands on a copy of “Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones” for the GameBoy Advance. I never finished it or even got very far, but every so often I would start up a new save file and try. The main theme, which has remained largely the same since the series’ birth in 1990, never ceased to excite me. It painted a picture of adventure in my ears that hit my dopamine receptors like nothing else.
And so, in a period of time where isolation is a matter of life and death and anxiety has hit millions like a truck, I once again felt compelled to throw myself into a world other than my own for a while. It’s a similar impulse to the one which drove everyone and their mom to obsess over “Tiger King” for a hot minute. But something about “Fire Emblem: Three Houses” struck my nostalgia nerve harder than anything else has in the past couple of years.
When I first finished it, I laughed, and my laughter turned into happy tears. I felt a connection to the younger self I had shunned for the first time in a long while, and it was wonderful in that moment to let a small part of me be a kid again, to be so incredibly excited over a bunch of pixels on a screen, to feel accomplished because of something nobody had to judge but myself.
In whatever moments you can find that feeling without losing sight of what’s around you, do. It’ll brighten your days more than you might expect.
Verdict: Mom’s Grilled Cheese/10. It just hits different, okay?
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